The monsoon reaches Saddar before it reaches anyone else

Every July the city argues about whether the rain will come. Saddar never argues. It simply puts the plastic sheets out a day early.

My grandfather kept a ledger of rain. Not the amounts, which he had no way of measuring, but the dates: the first drops on the tin awning of the paan shop below his flat on Preedy Street, the day the gutter on the corner overflowed, the day the water reached the second step of the building. Forty-one monsoons in a cloth-bound book that smelled of Tiger Balm. When he died my mother found it between his prayer mat and a tin of biscuits, and nobody could decide whether it was a diary or a weather record. I have it on my desk now. I think it was both.

Karachi is a city that does not believe in rain. We are built for heat and dust and the sea breeze, and every year the monsoon catches us out as if it had never happened before. Underpasses fill. Cars float in Gizri. The power goes for nine hours in one neighbourhood and not at all in the next, and the arguments on the family WhatsApp group about whose fault it is begin before the first cloud has finished emptying.

What the old buildings know

Saddar is different. Saddar has been through this. Walk down Abdullah Haroon Road in the last week of June and you will see the shopkeepers stacking their stock on bricks, rolling blue tarpaulin over the book carts, tying string around the bundles of school notebooks. The stone buildings from the 1920s, the ones with the carved balconies and the dates over the doorways, have deep verandahs because the people who built them had seen a Sindh monsoon. Nobody designs for rain any more. The glass towers on Shahrah-e-Faisal leak into their own lobbies.

When the first real storm comes, Saddar does something I have never seen anywhere else. It stops, collectively, and watches. Men stand under the arches of Empress Market with their hands in their pockets. The chai stall boy brings out every cup he owns. A rickshaw driver who has given up on the flooded road turns off his engine and lights a cigarette. For twenty minutes the busiest district in the city becomes a verandah full of people looking at the sky.

I started writing The Tide Clerk because of one of those twenty minutes. I was sheltering outside a shuttered optician's shop in 2015, and an old woman beside me said, to no one in particular, that the rain used to smell of the sea and now it smells of the road. I wrote it on my hand. It became the first line of chapter four.

Keeping the ledger

I keep my own ledger now, though mine is in a notes app and my grandfather would have disapproved. First rain, first flooded underpass, first power cut, first time my daughter asks to go out and stand in it. The dates matter less than the habit. A writer is someone who agrees to notice the same thing every year and to look for what has changed.

This year the first rain in Saddar came on the ninth of July, at about four in the afternoon. The plastic sheets had been out since the seventh.